curving upward on the graph of life then Vince was on a decidedly downward gradient. He was grinding towards fifty and for the last three months he had been living in a one-bedroom flat behind a fish-and-chip shop, ever since Wendy turned to him one morning over his breakfast muesli – he’d been on a short-lived health kick – and said, ‘Enough’s enough, don’t you think, Vince?’ leaving him slack-mouthed with astonishment over his Tesco Finest Berry and Cherry.
Ashley had just set off on her gap year, backpacking around South-East Asia with her surfer boyfriend. As far as Vince could tell, ‘gap year’ meant the lull between him funding her expensive private school and funding her expensive university, a remission that was nonetheless still costing him her airfares and a monthly allowance. When Vince was young he had been taught the worthy nonconformist virtues of self-discipline and self-improvement, whereas Ashley (not to mention the surfer boyfriend) simply believed in the ‘self’ bit. (Not that he was resentful. He loved her!)
As soon as Ashley had fledged, on an Emirates flight to Hanoi, Wendy reported to Vince that their marriage was dead. Its corpse wasn’t even cold before she was internet dating like a rabbit on speed, leaving him to dine off fish and chips most nights and wonder where it all went wrong. (Tenerife, three years ago, apparently.)
‘I got you some cardboard boxes from Costcutter to put your stuff in,’ she said as he stared uncomprehendingly at her. ‘Don’t forget to clear out your dirty clothes from the basket in the utility room. I’m not doing any more laundry for you, Vince. Twenty-one years a slave. It’s enough.’
This, then, was the return on sacrifice. You worked all the hours God gave, driving hundreds of miles a week in your company car, hardly any time for yourself, so your daughter could take endless selfies in Angkor Wat or wherever and your wife could report that for the last year she had been sneaking around with a local café owner who was also one of the lifeboat crew, which seemed to sanction the liaison in her eyes. (‘Craig risks his life every time he goes out on a shout. Do you, Vince?’ Yes, in his own way.) It clipped at your soul, clip, clip, clip.
Wendy enjoyed shaving and shearing, slicing and strimming. She had the Flymo out on the lawn almost every night in summer – over the years she had spent more time with the lawnmower than she had with Vince. And she might as well have had secateurs for hands. One of Wendy’s weird hobbies was growing a bonsai tree (or stopping it growing, Vince supposed), a cruel pastime that reminded him of those Chinese women who used to bind their feet. That was what she was doing to him now, snipping at his soul, trimming him down to a dwarf version of himself.
He had trudged through his life for his wife and daughter, more heroically than they could imagine, and this was the thanks he received. Couldn’t be a coincidence that ‘trudge’ rhymed with ‘drudge’. He had presumed that there was a goal to be reached at the end of all the trudging, but it turned out that there was nothing – just more trudging.
‘You again?’ the jolly, bustling woman behind the chip-shop counter said to him every time he came in. He could probably have reached out of his back window and into the chip shop and scooped the fish out of the fryer himself.
‘Yes, me again,’ Vince said without fail, brightly, as if it was a surprise to him too. It was like that film Groundhog Day, except that he didn’t learn anything (because, let’s face it, there was nothing to learn) and nothing ever changed.
Had he complained? No. In fact, that had been the refrain of his adult life. ‘Can’t complain.’ A British stoic to the core. Mustn’t grumble. Like someone in an old-fashioned sitcom. He was making up for it now, even if only to himself, because he still felt impelled to put on a good face for the world, it seemed bad manners to do otherwise. ‘If you can’t say something nice,’ his mother had tutored him, ‘then don’t say anything at all.’
‘One of each, please,’ he said to the woman in the chip shop. Was there anything more wretched than an about-to-be-divorced middle-aged man ordering a single fish supper?